Bees provide essential pollination services to natural ecosystems and agricultural crops. However, bee populations, both wild and farmed, are in decline around the world. To better manage and restore bee populations, long-term monitoring programs are needed. Direct monitoring of bees is expensive, time-consuming and requires a high level of expertise. Therefore, economic indicators for bee diversity and community composition are essential. The BEEMS Project, a project of Scientific and Technological Cooperation between Italy and Israel (Scientific Track 2019), aims to evaluate the cost-benefit ratio of new aerial Geomatics techniques compared to classical terrestrial methods to collect biotic and abiotic indicators of diversity bees and the composition of their communities. This work aims to present the project's progress, focusing on the Geomatics techniques applied to collect environmental data and produce spatial information useful for the work's progress

Paolo Dabove

Vincenzo Di Pietra

English

PORTO@iris (Publications Open Repository TOrino - Politecnico di Torino)

08 November 2022POLITECNICO DI TORINORepository ISTITUZIONALENew geomatics techniques for bees monitoring: the BEEMS project / DI PIETRA, Vincenzo; Dabove, Paolo. -ELETTRONICO. - (2021). ((Intervento presentato al convegno GIS Ostrava 2021 Advances in Localization andNavigation tenutosi a Ostrava (Czech Republic) nel March 17–19, 2021.OriginalNew geomatics techniques for bees monitoring: the BEEMS projectPublisher:PublishedDOI:Terms of use:openAccessPublisher copyright(Article begins on next page)This article is made available under terms and conditions as specified in the  corresponding bibliographic description inthe repositoryAvailability:This version is available at: 11583/2898612 since: 2021-05-07T10:54:47ZMichal Kamaík, Jan RžikaGIS Ostrava 2021 – Advances in Localization and Navigation March 17–19, 2021 NEW GEOMATICS TECHNIQUES FOR BEES MONITORING: THE BEEMS PROJECT Vincenzo Di Pietra1, Paolo Dabove1 1Department of Environment, Land, and Infrastructure Engineering, Politecnico di Torino, Corso Duca degli Abruzzi 24, Turin, 10129, Italy  Correspondence to: Paolo Dabove1 (paolo.dabove@polito.it) Abstract Bees provide essential pollination services to natural ecosystems and agricultural crops. However, bee populations, both wild and farmed, are in decline around the world. To better manage and restore bee populations, long-term monitoring programs are needed. Direct monitoring of bees is expensive, time-consuming and requires a high level of expertise. Therefore, economic indicators for bee diversity and community composition are essential. The BEEMS Project, a project of Scientific and Technological Cooperation between Italy and Israel (Scientific Track 2019), aims to evaluate the cost-benefit ratio of new aerial Geomatics techniques compared to classical terrestrial methods to collect biotic and abiotic indicators of diversity bees and the composition of their communities. This work aims to present the project's progress, focusing on the Geomatics techniques applied to collect environmental data and produce spatial information useful for the work's progress.   Keywords: Geomatics, photogrammetry, bees, multi-temporal analyses. INTRODUCTION Pollination plays a key role in maintaining global human food supply (Klein et al. 2007) and the functional integrity of most terrestrial ecosystems (Ollerton et al. 2011). While crop pollination relies mainly on managed colonies of the domesticated honey bee (Apis mellifera), wild, unmanaged pollinators were found to be highly effective, often critical contributors to pollination services in natural and agricultural systems (Garibaldi et al. 2013). Among these wild pollinators, native bees are the most important pollinator group (Delaplane and Mayer 2000). Diverse bee communities usually provide more efficient and reliable pollination services than a single pollinator species (Blüthgen & Klein 2011) and are therefore of high conservation priority. The on-going global declines in both wild and managed pollinators raised the interest in native bee conservation and restoration and therefore in long-term monitoring programs. However, executing such monitoring programs is a major challenge, as they are labor-intensive, and require high expertise in the collection of bees and their subsequent taxonomic identification. To date, little has been done in developing efficient tools for monitoring bee communities.  he current prevailing approach for bee monitoring is site sampling oriented, time-consuming and labor-intensive upon collecting the required amount of data. Another approach is identifying, determining, and measuring which biotic and abiotic indicators of floreal and nesting resources best reflect bee species diversity and community composition. Recent GIS Ostrava 2021 – Advances in Localization and Navigation March 17–19, 2021 advances in the field of remote sensing have allowed performing such measurements parallelly to classical ground methods. The use of Radar technology (Milanesio et al. 2020), UAVs, and image analysis can provide a wide-scale, fast, data-rich digital-platform for developing cost-effective bee monitoring programs. These tools have been widely used for many research activities, starting from subfluvial springs’ investigations (Aicardi et al. 2017), thermal analyses (Banding et al. 2012), forestry applications (Aicardi et al. 2016) and hyperspectral measurements (Weinmann et al. 2018).  The BEEMS project, a project of Scientific and Technological Cooperation between Italy and Israel (Scientific Track 2019), aims to develop a technology-based approach for advanced bee community monitoring, coupling photogrammetric tools, based on RGB images, with thermal and multispectral data, to develop a multi-scale and multi-temporal platform for monitoring bees and possibly other insect groups. This contribution wants to enhance this study's progress, focusing the attention on the methodology and future steps. METHODOLOGY AND CASE-STUDIES From a Geomatics point of view, the BEEMS project proposes to collect biotic and abiotic indicators, including both floral and nesting substrate surveys (above ground cover types and soil sampling), through the development of novel aerial remote sensing approaches, coupled with mapping techniques and image analysis. Moreover, the project wants to optimize data-acquiring approaches (aerial and ground) and indicators (floral and nesting resources) to reach a cost-effective platform for monitoring bee communities. At present, two measurement campaigns have already been carried out in two complementary study areas in central Israel, in February 2020. In each study system, several bees, flowers, bee nesting substrates and soil surveys have been considered and investigated using classical tools/approaches and applying advanced photogrammetric tools, based not only on RGB images but also on thermal and multispectral data. All the data processing phases have been performed exclusively through Geographic Free and Open Source Software (GFOSS), mainly using the QGIS software for spatial analysis and the creation of thematic maps, the libraries of the open-source project Orfeo Toolbox (OTB) for the segmentation and classification of very high-resolution images, and the development of ad-hoc machine learning techniques for the information extraction, useful for the project. The work plan is divided into three main steps: 1. Acquiring biotic and abiotic indicators of floral and nesting resources using classical ground methods.  2. Developing novel aerial remote sensing, mapping and image analysis to compare traditional with innovative Geomatics methods.  3. Processing and synthesizing the data collected by the ground and aerial methods: the obtained indicators will identify and optimize data-acquiring approaches and improve the bee’s monitoring activities. This work focuses on data acquisition and data processing through the use of remote sensing approach and photogrammetric procedure. The two different environment sites GIS Ostrava 2021 – Advances in Localization and Navigation March 17–19, 2021 located in Israel considered in this project are the Judean foothills, a shrublands/maquis ecosystem with vertisoil made as a mosaic of agricultural fields and planted pine forests (at SE of Tel Aviv), and the Alexander Stream National Park, a coastal sand ecosystem subject of restoration policies (at N of Tel Aviv). In these areas, six plots have been identified where the analyses have been performed. For the surveys, a DJI Matrice 200 UAV with a Slantrange 4P+ multispectral camera have been used. This camera has six channels integrated with an ambient illumination sensor (AIS), a LiDAR and a GNSS receiver for direct georeferencing and radiometric calibration of images. The advantages of using such sensors are to avoid using a calibration panel on the ground for the on-site image calibration while instead measuring simultaneously the incident and reflected sunlight for direct calibration. The specifications are reported in Table 1, while the in-flight set-up is showed in Fig. 1. During the two survey campaigns, about 20 flights were made, and around 150 GB of 2048 x 1536 pixels images have been acquired, with a mean ground sample distance (GSD) of about 2 cm. The information stored in the images is the RGB channels and the Red-W, the Red Edge and the Near InfraRed ones. A total of 27 Ground Control Points (GCPs) have been measured in both test sites with a multi-frequency, multi-constellation geodetic GNSS receiver in RTK mode.    Fig. 1. Instruments used during the survey’s campaigns  Table 1. Technical specifications of the hardware used during the data acquisition. GIS Ostrava 2021 – Advances in Localization and Navigation March 17–19, 2021       RESULTS The photogrammetric processing results are several digital products that contain radiometric, texture, spectral, and spatial information. These products are: - Three-dimensional dense point clouds (DPC); - Digital Surface Models (DSM); - Digital Terrain Models (DTM); - Orthomosaic map; All these products are georeferenced and defined in WGS84-UTM zone 36N. The results are summarized in Table 2 and 3 for Alexander Stream National Park and the Judean foothills. Table 2. Summary of processing parameters and accuracy results of the Alexander Stream National Park site's digital products.  Digital Product Parameters Dataset 1 Dataset 3 Dataset 4 Aerial images number 4.446 3.918 5.022 DPC point number 171.888.569 130.377.749 170.992.083 processing time 28 min 38 min 38 min DSM map    GIS Ostrava 2021 – Advances in Localization and Navigation March 17–19, 2021 size 10,127x13,513 11,317x6,440 8,813x12,936 dim pixel 2,57 cm/pix 2,86 cm/pix 2,75 cm/pix processing time 3 min 2 min 24min Orthomosaic map    band number 6 6 6 size 19,870x27,002 22,623x12,87 17,569x25,85 dim pixel 1,28 cm/pix 1,43 cm/px 1,38 cm/pix processing time 27 min 15 min 43 min  Table 3. Summary of processing parameters and accuracy results of the Judean foothills site's digital products. The Judean foothills Digital Product Parameters Dataset 1  Dataset 2) Dataset 3 Aerial images number 1.450 6.846 4.722 DPC point number 98.452.320 194.483.854 82.769.132 processing time 37 min 3 hours 1 hours 40 min DSM map    size  9,595 x 10,824  13,979 x 13,852  7,042 x 8,467 dim pixel 1,61 cm/pix 1,9 cm/px 2,01 xm/pix processing time 2 min 27 min 2 min Orthomosaic     band 6 6 6 GIS Ostrava 2021 – Advances in Localization and Navigation March 17–19, 2021 number size  19,190 x 21,648 27,904 x 27,696  13,929 x 16,893 dim pixel 0,08 cm/pix 0,09 cm/pix 1,01 cm/pix processing time 22 min 3 hours 115 min  From the photogrammetric process, it was possible to compute several spatial and spectral features, useful to data interpretation and classification. In particular, thanks to the six bands' combination, it was possible to compute vegetation, water content, and soil indices. In total, more than 20 indices have been computed. Fig. 2, shows some of these features, highlighting the high resolution obtained.  Fig. 2. Radiometric indices obtained after the photogrammetric processing CONCLUSIONS The BEEMS project wants to test new aerial Geomatics techniques compared to classical terrestrial methods to collect biotic and abiotic indicators of diversity bees and their communities' composition. This work has presented the project's progress, highlighting the new Geomatics techniques based on advanced photogrammetric tools, to develop a multi-scale and multi-temporal platform for monitoring bees. The next steps will be to apply a machine-learning algorithm to automatically extract the required indicators and compare them with those obtained, considering classical techniques. In particular, supervised and unsupervised classifications will be used, and different classification models to assess these GIS Ostrava 2021 – Advances in Localization and Navigation March 17–19, 2021 case studies' performances. 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New geomatics techniques for bees monitoring: the BEEMS project

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New geomatics techniques for bees monitoring: the BEEMS project

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